From Küsnacht, or Visnau, by steamer to Lucerne. Then Pilatus to Alpnach. Then by Sarnen, Sacheln, Lungern, and the Brünig to Meiringen.
Alternative: From Pilatus to Stanzstad, Stanz, Engelberg, the Surenen Pass, to Klus. From Klus to Wasen. From Wasen by the Susten Pass to Im Hof.
From Meiringen, or Im Hof, by the Grimsel to the Rhone Glacier. From the Rhone Glacier by the Upper Valais to Viesch. From Viesch to Eggischhorn.
Alternative: From the Rhone Glacier Hotel, or the Grimsel Hospice, to the Eggischhorn by the Oberaarjoch.
From Eggischhorn to Rieder Alp. From Rieder Alp to Bell Alp. From Bell Alp to Brieg.
If you want more details than our map supplies, procure the sections for the district of General Dufour’s map. It is a map which is almost a picture. It gives the contour of every mountain and valley, and indicates every châlet.
Everything with which we have to do has, or ought to have, its science. So therefore it is, or ought to be, with enjoyment. Anticipation in this science counts for something. The brute only it is who goes straight to the main point first, and at once. Man, endowed with reason, and because he is, looks forward to what will give pleasure. He sees it at the end of a long vista. He dallies with the anticipation, he works up to the supreme fruition. To him there are preparatory stages. And these stages, because they are preparatory, are delightful. This is a privilege of mind. Herein is the philosophy of wooing first and of marrying afterwards. If the course of the wooing have been somewhat prolonged and not quite smooth, so much the better for the marriage. The Turk, who marries without the wooing, is unscientific.
In our science arrangement is well-nigh sovereign. It would not do to begin your dinner with iced pudding and maraschino, taking next venison and champagne, then descending through entrées to fish, and concluding with the anticlimax of a plate of Julienne. This were what a pig or a Fiji might do. Reason, and a palate, and a human stomach were given us for a better purpose. And as it is with the details of the dinner, so is it with the dinner as a whole. It is too great an event to be placed early in the day. It would not do to have it served at 10 A.M., and then what you would have had for your breakfast served at 8 P.M. On this inverted plan what would in the twenty-four hours be given to the palate and to the stomach would be precisely the same, but as Wordsworth says of another matter, ‘Oh, the difference!’ The dinner must be looked forward to, for everything after it comes flat. It must be worked up to: in a sense, earned. The labours of the day are lightened, because there is something worthy of them coming at the end of it.
Our science, too, is not one of the rigidly pure order. It is an applied science, and makes the most of its materials and opportunities. For instance, in this same matter of dinner it sees far more than is taken into account in the philosophy of the strong-minded, who say that to assuage hunger is its single object. Certes, it would be so if again we were all of us pigs or Fijis. But we have been evolved into something higher, and so have been enabled to turn dinner to some other accounts. To us the naked, primal purpose is hardly primal, and no longer naked. We have so wreathed it with flowers, so surrounded it with and made it so to minister to other purposes, that the original purpose has long ceased to be all in all, and what is incidental—even so far from the original animal purpose as good fellowship, society, and conversation—has ostensibly become now the main object. These incidental and secondary objects had no place in the original idea. So far, the strong-minded are right. But now, to their discomfiture, the secondary objects, which are altogether humanizing, and at all events semi-intellectual, have much mitigated the old animalism of the matter, and have become almost the main idea; of course, to those in whom what is humanizing and intellectual has assumed some form and consistency.
And so, to come at last to the matter we have been dealing with in the foregoing pages, is it with a Swiss excursion and its objects and incidents. Arrangement should be studied, and the objects should be taken in an ascending, not in a descending scale. What in its proper place and in a right order is good, sapid, enjoyable, would become in a wrong place, and in an inverted order, bad, insipid, unenjoyable. You must, too, study variety, and light and shade. If you arrange to have things good only in one and the same kind, and all of the highest intensity, everything being grand and striking in the same way, you will soon get tired of what you are about; and deservedly so. Keep the best thing for the end, or for a place towards the end. Look forward to what is best, work up to it, and approach it by an ascending scale. Do not take the Eggischhorn first, and then go to the Lake of Lucerne and the Forest Cantons. So much for anticipation and arrangement.